We need to harness the power of anonymised big data and do
social good, Nuria Oliver told the audience at Wired 2013,
imploring public and private companies to come together to achieve
this.

Oliver led a team at Telefonica Digital, where she works as
scientific director of its research and development department, to
prove the worth of this statement in the aftermath of the H1N1 flu
outbreak in Mexico in 2009. When it occurred, the Mexican
government did everything it was meant to -- first issuing a level
one warning recommending people stay at home, then level two
recommending schools close and flights be grounded, and finally a
level three warning (during a national holiday) after the virus
showed no signs of slowing, which equated to a total country
shutdown. Despite all their best efforts, the World Health
Organisation had announced the first flu pandemic was underway less
than two months after the initial outbreak.

"However, both the WHO and the US Centres for Disease Control
and Prevention praised the Mexican government -- they did
everything they could. But the economic cost was tremendous --
billions of dollars. It hit the tourist industry and took months if
not years to recover from.

Two questions needed to be answered -- did the Mexican people
follow the measures and reduce mobility, and did those measures
actually slow down the disease progression? This, Telefonica set
out to answer.

"There's no hard evidence to quantitatively answer these
questions. Surveys etc, are slow and don't scale and are
unreliable. But today, for first time in human history thanks to
big data, we can shed light."

The team aggregated large-scale anonymous data supplied by the
ubiquitous smartphone from the outbreak to the WHO announcement,
which collated acted as a map depicting human movement. Three
important findings came out to help answer the first question --
did people heed the instructions? They found that at the first
alert level, there was little change. However masses heeded level
two, with 80 percent reduced mobility. This dropped during the
third level to 55 percent, possibly because of the national
holiday.

When it came to the second question, whether the disease spread
was stymied, the answer was a resounding yes. When two simulations
were run on two million people, one asking what if nothing had been
done and one collating known data from what actually happened, they
found the peak was delayed by ten percent and delayed by two
days.

"This can be very significant in context of an outbreak. We must
reduce the peak as it's when emergency services are under the most
pressure -- it gives us time to mobilise staff and order drugs.
That was translated into thousands of people staying healthy."

The team also found there was a rush of activity around airports
during level two, suggesting people were in a rush to flee to other
areas of the country which would accelerate the spread.

"This was a small research project, with just two researchers.
It's just a seed, but with this seed we could grow into a
tree."

"For this to become something larger we need to work with public
institutions that have the decision-making power and implement some
of these measures with other types of data. We can gain a profound
understanding of reality. We live in a world rich with data, and we
can combine many kinds like transport, weather, emergency
services.

Telefonica already has projects ongoing with the United Nations
and the World Food Project on things like understanding the impact
of natural disasters on the most vulnerable and how crop disease
affect migrant workers.

"We would like to help plant a forest of big data for social
good, opening up this data so other people can work with us
and solve these problems."